Prickly City by Scott Stantis for July 09, 2021

The internet is killing the printed press.

And apparently journalism, the thing were reports follow stories and check sources and don’t intentionally tell lies.

I guess those days are gone. My lie is bigger so I win, no, mine is truerer so I win.

Which lie will make the bigger headline and get the most hits?

Now we now the truth.

Sorry newspapers: Print is a huge expense with very little advantage. I don’t know what it costs to print 1,000,000 copies of The New York Times every day, but it must be enormous. And what’s the advantage? The joy of holding an object? (Which is pretty unwieldy and hard to hold, BTW).

If I was a newspaper company, I’d have a print edition only for subscribers who wanted one, and the rest would be online, raising money through advertising. Maybe have a local advertising section – you know, like a newspaper does – for people who were actually looking to buy something.

I used to have sympathy for failing newspapers. But in the last several years on their sites they started this autoplay video crap, and now they’re blocking ad blockers. They can all burn in hell as far as I’m concerned, because they’re not even doing journalism anymore.

Local newspapers will be propped up where Sinclair & Murdoch need propaganda distributors.

Journalism itself was dealt a possibly fatal blow when Reagan permitted cable “news” was to broadcast lies without fair rebuttal. Retractions after the fact are irrelevant, the damge is done.

Der is dat…………….buy your local paper’s subscription, at least the online paper.

The Press is vital, but I have a hard time sympathizing with the newspapers that have steadily cheapened their product and tossed out everything I like. When they throw comics overboard, there’s not much for me to stay around for.

Maybe they shouldn’t name the paper after a pig (sorta).

There are people who like the feel of a physical paper.

There are people who don’t have computers or mobile devices (or get eyestrain trying to read more than a few lines on a phone),

The problem is, how many of those people are out there, and is it enough to sustain print media?

There is a gradual generational die off of newspaper readership. Only the earliest baby boomers and their elders remain in the audience. It will be better for the environment once paper usage is almost entirely eliminated.

Like SHE has a subscription?

the press is killing itself, its a day late, a dollar shy and too conservative

Local American newspapers, covering local issues and stories are the only place left were real journalism is actually being practiced.

We subscribe to our local newspaper because their reporters are really good. Most of the time, they actually present both sides of an issue, and their writing shows that they paid attention when being taught grammar and sentence structure. It’s a paper worth supporting.

My local newspaper is dying, too – although I’m surprised it didn’t die years ago. It was already declining before Internet news took its toll – our newspaper was mostly editorialized versions of stories that were already covered on the TV news. Our paper also cut out more and more local coverage, despite that TV and Internet media was also not covering it… Their delivery service got unreliable, too – I might only get two papers some weeks of my daily subscription, with no answers when I complained…

The last straw, for me, was our paper’s sudden decision to drop an advertising section that I had paid to advertise in. It hurt the small business that I was starting, plus instead of running the rest of my advertisements someplace else all they offered was to extend my subscription. After some digging, I found that the reason they dropped that advertising section was because the lady in charge of it left, and nobody wanted to take it over, and they were not going to hire a replacement. So in effect, when they dropped me I dropped them.